Gray clouds hang over the Marriott Theatre's 'Ragtime'

Liz Lauren photo

The cast of "Ragtime" at the Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire.

The cast of "Ragtime" at the Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire. (Liz Lauren photo)

Chris JonesChicago Tribune

In the final moments of “Ragtime,” the beautifully scored 1998 musical from Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, there is a vision of how America could be: unified in diversity, learning from history, taking care of all its children. Throughout the two-decade history of this courageous show, that ending has sent audiences out into the night believing in their better selves, and the better self of a nation, even if reality soon was to intrude.

But the director of the Marriott Theatre production, Nick Bowling, has changed that ending, infusing its harmonics with the silent but central presence of the show’s most notorious character, a racist bigot named Willie Conklin, the man who destroys the life and family of the show’s passionate hero, Colehouse Walker Jr., a role beautifully sung and acted at the Marriott by Nathaniel Stampley.

The motivation, no doubt, was to make the point that bigotry hardly was vanquished at the end of the “Ragtime” era, and that the interracial (and interclass) family in which both the show and the source novel by E.L. Doctorow placed such stock for the future would have a hard road to drive. But it’s an example of a nervous director overreaching and not trusting the material.

“Ragtime,” the story of turn-of-the-century fear and change in America, has always been deeply infused with the pain of Colehouse and his wife, Sarah, her role so beautifully realized here by the emerging Chicago star Katherine Thomas. The show is not suggesting anything is solved, it is merely proffering the only viable solution, then and now. And had the bookwriter, Terrence McNally, and the songwriters, Flaherty and Ahrens, wanted “The Wheels of a Dream” to be overwhelmed by the Willie Conklin nightmare, a nightmare we all well know we still are living, they would have put him in the number.

Bowling’s show — which is otherwise good — has enormous difficulty embracing the show’s inherent optimism, which probably says as much about the current moment as the artistic choices here being embraced. Even the typically joyous first entrance of the African-American cast-members, reflecting Colehouse’s initial belief in the country of his birth, lacked the usual pizazz. So does Sarah and Colehouse’s rushed courtship, which here feels doomed from the start.

Indeed, if you look at this production as evidence, the wheels only have turned backward since 1998, the year of this musical’s Broadway debut. I’ve always left “Ragtime” infused with renewed optimism — the catharsis of the piece, which played for years in downtown Chicago, is structured that way. This time I felt quite sad. That’s a perfectly legitimate thing to wish might happen to an audience in the theater, and Bowling is a very capable and often-compelling director of musicals; I am just not convinced it is fair to this piece.

Still, when you see a “Ragtime” with an excellent cast, there always is much to appreciate. Aside from Thomas, who is phenomenal, there is a most interesting performance from Benjamin Magnuson as Tateh. It’s a piece of acting shorn of the usual Broadway sentimentalism, a deeper-than-usual dive into the immigrant persona, a more honest Tateh, you might say, but mercifully not one devoid of belief in an idea. Kathy Voytko, who plays the middle-aged white woman whose eyes progressively are opened, sings her role and its exquisite ballads with great beauty. But the emotional life of this quietly radical, ultimately revolutionary woman seems muted: There is not enough fire in her deeply seated belief — right, wrong, not the point — that the wheels are spinning in the right direction.